As many of you may know, the ACF has teamed up with the Alzheimer's Association and will be participating in an event called the "Longest Day" on June 21st. Richard Beckwith and I have formed a team and will be participating in the event. We invite anyone that is interested to join our team and help us partake in the event. We also will be collecting donations leading up to and at the event and have a goal to raise $1,600 dollars. With less than 3 months to go, we are still far off our goal and really need your help!

I am pleased to announce that as part of the Longest Day promotion, we will be doing a raffle. Any current ACF member, or anyone interested in a membership will be able to participate. Basically, for every 5 dollars you donate, you would get one entry into the raffle. For example, if you donate 20 dollars, you would get 4 entries. After the Longest Day event, a winner and a runner up will be chosen at random. The prize for winning will be a choice between a one year free ACF membership or a free copy of the yearly end 2014 International Checker's Hall of Fame book and a free official ACF checkerboard (pieces not included). The runner up will get to choose between the book or board.

If you are interested in donating please click the link to go to our donation page, http://act.alz.org/site/TR/LongestDay/TheLongestDay?team_id=200435&amp;pg=team&amp;fr_id=5860. Simply, all you need to do then is click the "donate" tab and you can enter your information there. Just make sure you leave your name so we know who donated what. We really appreciate and are grateful for any donation no matter how great or how small! Lastly, if you are interested in joining our team, you can easily just click the "join our team" tab and follow the instructions. If you have any questions or concerns please feel free to comment below or you can email me at joseph.moore.314@gmail.com. You can also find a detailed description of our Longest Day plans in April's ACF bulletin issue or on the ACF facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/usacheckers.

With your help we can not only help fight Alzheimer's, but we can also give our game and organization a great opportunity to grow and increase membership. I truly believe we all can make a positive difference for this game, one that we can all be proud of. Please consider helping us in this effort!

The Longest Day event finally took place on Saturday June 21st. Richard Beckwith, Kathy Wirthwein, and myself hosted a checkers display, including awareness and information about Alzheimer's at a Bob Evans in Twinsboro, Ohio. To be honest, we did not get quite the trafficking we expected, but we did open a few eyes to our game. One boy told us how much he loved checkers a few years back when he was younger, but stopped playing due to Playstation and video games. He seemed very interested in the game and curious to learn more. Not sure if he will join, but we at least opened his mind to the idea, which is the most we really can do as promoters of this game. Overall, we were very close to achieving our goal of 1600 dollars raised. We are still in the process of determining the exact amount as some of it was not donated directly to the website. I want to thank everyone who donated to this cause and promotion. We really appreciate the generosity. I also want to thank John Acker and the Missouri tournament crew for raising awareness about the event over their tournament weekend. As promised, there will be a raffle for those who donated and wish to be an ACF member. For every 5 dollars you donated, you will get one entry into the raffle. If you donated 50 dollars you get 10 entries, if you donated 20 dollars you get 4 entries. You can read the details above regarding the prizes for 1st and 2nd place as they remain the same. The winners will be announced on this forum as well as the USA Checkers Facebook page and the ACF bulletin. Winners will be announced within the next week. I also within that time will be posting some pictures of the event on the USA Checkers Facebook page. In other great news, we have been in contact with some other businesses including Barnes and Noble in regards to promoting our game. We are very excited for things to come. We request that anyone who may be interested, to please consider joining us in our quest to market checkers anyway you can. Checkers is a beautiful game that can catch the interest of many people if we just show them.

Congratulations to the first place raffle winner Mark Sokolovsky of Ohio! Mark wins the choice of either a one year free ACF membership or a free edition of the 2014 International Checker Hall of Fame book and a new official ACF checkerboard.

Congratulations to the runner up of the raffle, Charles Walker of Mississippi! Charles wins the choice of either a new official ACF checkerboard or the 2014 International Checker Hall of Fame book. Charles donated the most money among ACF members, donating a whooping 100 dollars!

Thank you both for your contributions! On behalf of the Longest Day team, I am pleased to present you your rewards.

Also, our donation total is currently $1,562. This is $38 short of our goal of $1,600, but we are still awaiting the Bob Evans figures in which a good number of individuals and families had 15% of their meals donated to the cause. We expect to reach our goal for this event. Thank you again to everyone who helped to make this event a success!